Excel can do research for you! Find facts and build heatmaps in seconds

Did you know that Excel can do research?

It can automatically find information for you.

And it can also display information on maps.

All in a matter of seconds.

Excel can do research using Data Types

Let’s say you want to do research about a country.

Simply enter the country’s name in a cell. Then go to the Data Types section of the data ribbon, and select Geography.

Click on the button that appears to the upper right of the cell, and Excel can do research on dozens of facts about the country.

It can tell you the population, GDP, capital, or even obscure things like the percent of forested area and physicians per thousand.

You can also research a person.

Simply type in someone’s name, then select the People data type. You can learn that Bill Gates’s net worth is $134 billion, weighs 61.4 kg, has children named Rory, Phoebe, and Jennifer, and dozens of other facts about him.

Alternatively, Excel can do research on stocks. Excel tells me Ford Motor Company has a price (as of the time I’m writing) of $12.83, a market cap of $50.3 billion, and a P/E ratio of 13.26.

If you’re not sure what data type to choose, you can just select Automatic, and Excel will choose for you.

What data types are available?

The available data types in Excel are:

• Stocks
• Currencies
• Geography
• Anatomy
• Animals
• Chemistry
• Cities
• Locations
• Medical
• Movies
• Foods
• Terrain
• People
• Plants
• Space
• Universities
• Yoga

Each of these have dozens of facts that Excel can look up for you.

Using Data Types to create instant heat maps

If you use Excel to do research for countries, states, provinces, or other geographic regions, you can then create instant heat maps.

Simply highlight your data – the data that Excel already automatically filled in for you – then go to the Insert ribbon, and in the Charts section, select Maps, then Filled Map.

And you’re done.

I hope learning Excel can do research for you demonstrates some of the easy yet incredibly powerful capabilities of Excel.

Be sure to subscribe to Rockstar Excel’s mailing list for more ways that Excel can make your life easier. You can also book a free consultation to learn how we can save your business time and money, check out our upcoming classes, and submit a question to be answered in a future video/blog post.